Bucket list: Britain 3. Eileen Agar is another one of the women being featured as under represented by history. Her exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London shows similarities with many of the avant-garde women artists working at the time: Collage, surrealism, photography and documents, and a certain eccentricity.
She was Argentinian born to a Scottish father and American mother, both with family enterprises. Growing up in England, she was exposed to Surrealism in particular and became part of that movement (the Whitechapel show contains other "Phantoms of Surrealism" women artists though I wouldn't call Claude Cahun a phantom). Agar was one of few to synthesize surrealism with cubism.
In 1930 she began to work with found objects especially marine life, shells, bones and plants. (in this she reminded me of Charlotte Perriand). She was part of the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition held London.
Eileen Agar, Erotic Landscape , 1942
Hepworth Makes Britain a Bucket List Destination
Bucket list: Britain.
Poised to hit the 'reserve' button on my airline app, I am still bombarded with variant messages despite Britain's overall declining rate.
A tenth anniversary exhibition of Barbara Hepworth's work at the Hepworth-Wakefield Museum in Yorkshire is on the list. An eccentric aunt owned a small Hepworth which I did not alas inherit. But even the 'small' evoked a feeling of grace and importance. (There is another Hepworth museum and studio at her home in St Ives on the bucket)
Unlike many of the women artists manque rediscovered today (see Jillian Steinhauer’s excellent piece on this phenomenon in Believer Magazine), Hepworth had a strong career during her lifetime, as the exhibit shows. Her exposure to the Parisians (Brancusi, Arp, Zadkine et al) and friendly rivalry with contemporary Henry Moore made an early difference.
But like the Jenny-come-lately artists, (see Hurtado, etc) she had to juggle the house and children (triplets !) and a child from her first marriage and her second husband, artist Ben Nicholson had a thriving career of his own and was often gone missing. (They divorced also in 1951.)
She managed. “I’ve slowly discovered how to create for 30 mins, cook for 40 mins, create for another 30 and look after children for 50 and so on through the day,” (they once all had measles at the same time) she wrote in a 1939 letter excerpted in The Guardian. “It’s a sort of miracle.
Hepworth died from smoking in bed.
Barbara Hepworth with plaster for Figure for Landscape and Figure Archaean, 1964. Photo:Lucien Myers.